Nice post by a teaching economist on why supply and demand can be confusing. And further.

Seth Goodin on modern marketing-building it into your product and understanding what you are selling is ideas.

Paul Romer sees history as being a matter of technology and rules: Technologies rearrange materials with ingenious recipes and formulas. … Rules ( Read more... )

I am deeply sceptical about the fiscal stimuli that are being bandied around. Reading Scott Sumner’s friendly and informative (though inherently difficult because monetary economics is an inherently difficult subject) monetary economics blog has increased my scepticism ( Read more... )

A classic of economic history is Ronald Coase’s article on lighthouses (pdf), where he pointed out the claim that one did not get private lighthouses-that lighthouses were a classic “market failure” only government could fixprovide-was simply false.

One of the more recent economic theory fads was “path dependence”, with stories being told about ( Read more... )

Examining why chimpanzees do not trade items when they do trade services in the wild and will trade tokens in laboratory experiments: lack of ownership norms seems to be central.

Analysing gift exchange (pdf).

Analysing barter (pdf).

There may be reasons to reform health care: international competitiveness is not one of them.

About the rise of ( Read more... )

Came across a review article by Professor Michael E. Smith, The Archaeology of Ancient State Economies [link to pdf download], which I found enlightening.

The references to the origins and history of money I found particularly striking, so have followed up by reading John F. Henry The Social Origins of Money: the Case of Egypt [pdf] and Eric ( Read more... )

About monetary policy, financial regulation and arguments over asset bubbles.

The Indian company behind the cheap car is now doing cheap apartments.

Gold coin dispensing machines for German-speaking countries.

Help Africa, stop giving it aid: As Thompson puts it: "The British Treasury is empty. So you are going to be borrowing money in order to ( Read more... )

Last night (Monday), went to a reading and discussion of the first part of Chapter 11 of Andrew Bernstein's The Capitalist Manifesto which discusses the contribution of Western corporations to the Soviet economy from the end of "War Communism" and the beginning of the New Economic Policy to the first of Stalin's Five Year PlansI had read bits and ( Read more... )

(This LJ [was originally called] ‘thinking out aloud”. So here is some. It is me expressing what I understand about the economics of money from my reading over the years.)

Money is a medium of exchange. Which is a fancy phrase meaning we use it to buy things. Barter is exchange without money, and is a clumsy and awkward way of trading, since ( Read more... )

Anthropologist Peter Wells From Barbarians to Angels: the Dark Ages Reconsidered seeks to rehabilitate the Dark Ages as a period of high cultural activity without major declines in population, urban life or economic activity, basing his analysis on the archaeological evidence ( Read more... )

If (1) we control something enough ( Read more... )